The Last Book I Finished in 2012!

72.  The White Road, John Connolly
I read this one hella out of order - I think it comes third or fourth in the Charlie Parker chronology.  I kind of wish I HAD read them in order, though, because then the explicitness of the supernatural in the later books might not have bugged me.  This one was quite good, one of Connolly's strongest; I do love it when Connolly gets down and dirty in the South, and The White Road takes place in Charleston, South Carolina, and is just as hot, sweaty and claustrophobic as the setting suggests.  An interesting look at internalized racism and institutional violence.

I'm going to do a reflection post after this, with a complete list and star rating for everything I read this year.  I also have to decide what my reading resolution is for 2013 - I don't think it'll be quite as strict, but I have enjoyed the amount of reading I got done in 2012, and this blog is easier to update with a goal in mind, so I'll  figure something out.  I hope everyone read some good stuff last year, and continue to do so in 2013!

Holiday Break Reading

66.  Snuff, Terry Pratchett
Sam Vimes is my favorite character in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, so I was excited to find one of his books I hadn't read yet.  There's a bit of a template for the books featuring Vimes: he investigates a crime with vigor, typically because no one else will touch it, causing lots of political upheaval because he's Vimes and he has no fucks to give about class hierarchy.  Vimes is Pratchett's mouthpiece for exploring classism, racism, and cultural collision, and Snuff is no different from Feet of Clay, The Fifth Elephant, or Thud! in this respect.  Instead of golems, dwarves, or trolls, we have goblins, treated like vermin by the rest of the sentient creatures on the Discworld - until Vimes investigates a murder.  It's a template book, but Pratchett's writing is so damn good and his characters are so damn fantastic (this one in particular has the chance to develop Vimes' son, who is a typical six-year-old - obsessed with bodily functions and adorably empathetic) that it really doesn't matter.  It's a lovely cap to the adventures of Vimes.

67.  The Whisperers, John Connolly
Another template author, Connolly's books about Charlie Parker are all pretty similarly mapped out.  Like Pratchett, Connolly escapes a lot of criticism because of the strength of his writing and his characters; I particularly loved the way The Whisperers played with perspective and tense.  Much of it is told from the first-person perspective of Parker, but Connolly hardly lets this restrict the story, feeling free to bounce between narrators, third-person perspective, and back and forth in the story's timeline.  It never loses coherency and provides a neat way of telling the story, wherein the reader has more pieces than Parker but in a way that doesn't spoil the final confrontation.

68.  Blackout, Mira Grant
This was a satisfying way to end her zombie trilogy, but I do think that Blackout ends up being the weakest of the three.  One of the biggest conflicts in the novel is an existential dilemma that never really convinced me; it might be genre-jadedness, since it's a question that pops up in a lot of science fiction books I've read, but (without spoiling anything) Grant doesn't push it hard enough for it to be effective.  Other than that, Blackout is exciting and satisfying, if a little rushed at the conclusion; the final scene seems a bit too easily tied up.  I think the problem is that Feed, the first book, was SO strong and SO compelling that, even though Deadline and Blackout are really good reads, they don't quite measure up to the power of the first book.  You'll want to finish the story, though, because it's a hell of a ride (and I'd rather read Grant's worst book than the best book from SOME authors, just sayin').

Ghost Stories and Zombies

Y'all know how much I love lists.  In a break from our regular programming, I present to you:

Martha's Top Ten Horror Novels

Because it's Halloween, and All

If you read my other blog, Boycott Bluray (if not, why don't you?) you may have heard about my aversion to watching horror movies.  It comes with a lot of  caveats - I don't like ghost stories but am generally fine with slasher movies, but I'm also utterly fascinated by them and spend hours reading the plots of horror movies I will never ever watch on Wikipedia.  Also, I've been watching (and enjoying!) American Horror Story.  So, you know.  When I say I don't like watching horror films, take it with a grain of salt.

One thing I can say definitively is that I love READING horror, and I have for a long time.  So, in this spookiest of seasons, let me share with you some of my favorites.

Blood Music, Greg Bear

Medical and body horror.  Greg Bear is masterful at medical-based science fiction, and this novella is the perfect blend of clinical medical science and eerie future tech.  It's a little bit Prey, a little bit The Blob, and a whole lot of skin-crawling disease.

Bonechiller, Graham McNamee

For anyone who thinks creature features aren't scary.  This one, taking place in the frozen darkness of Alaska in the wintertime, reaches right into your primal survival center and wrings you out.  It's about a creature that stalks children, biting them...and returning later to collect.  A group of kids decide to fight back.  This novel is creepy and cold, living up to its title, and will make you want to stay indoors once the sun goes down.

Curse of the Wendigo, Rick Yancey

This is the second book in Yancey's Monstrumologist series, and I think it's the best.  Everything the first volume does, Wendigo does better: the gritty Victorian setting, examining human nature, peeling back the layers of civility to expose the savagery within.  It expands the world of Will Henry and his monster-studying (and hunting) master, Dr. Pelinore Warthrop, and does what The Monstrumologist didn't quite manage to do: give the good doctor some humanity.  It's also viscerally disgusting and pretty terrifying, especially when you consider that this is a young adult novel.

Every Dead Thing, John Connolly

I'm not a big fan of cops and robbers mysteries, which is why it is continually a pleasure to read Connolly's books about the intrepid investigator Charlie Parker.  These are detective stories imbued with a heavy amount of supernatural horror, and while he hardly ever comes out and actually says that Parker is involved in a larger war between good and evil, it's heavily implied.  Parker is a man haunted by figurative ghosts, until he starts tracking a grisly serial killer...and the ghosts who speak to him become much more literal, and much more personal.  There are a whole bunch of these, and I recommend them all.

Feed, Mira Grant  

Less outright horror, this superbly written zombie novel slowly reveals details of life in the world post-zombie apocalypse as well as bites of a conspiracy that will make your hair stand on end.  It questions the nature of truth, the relationship we have to fear, and the human survival instinct.  Not your average zombie story - quite a bit better, in fact.

House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

I freely confess to not having finished this book...yet.  The truth is, it got under my skin so bad that I had to walk away from it for a while, and it's so dense that it's been a little intimidating to get back to.  When I started it I had no idea that a book about a house that is larger on the inside than it is on the outside

Rotters, Daniel Kraus

A zombie book that has no zombies in it.  It's just as gross, though!  Joey, the main character, moves in with his dad after his mother dies and discovers that Dad makes his living digging up the dead and plundering their coffins.  So, naturally, he decides to learn the family trade.  Kraus is so descriptive the pages fairly reek of the dead, and even though there's nothing supernatural about this story you'll still want the lights on when Joey decides to take some unconventional measures to solve a bully problem later in the book.

'Salem's Lot, Stephen King

There are two King novels on this list, and I STRUGGLED to keep him from overtaking it completely.  But I finally decided I couldn't live without 'Salem's Lot being here, because it is, simply put, one of the best vampire novels ever written.  King's vampires are not romanticized, which makes them more frightening than most.  They are animals, and they are clever, and no matter how young their bodies are they will eat you.

The Shining, Stephen King

Let's face it, my top ten Stephen King novels could probably comprise a list of its own - he's prolific and extremely good at what he does, and that is to bring me, white knuckled, to the edge of my seat with slow-burn terror.  I think The Shining is pretty much the microcosmic best of what Stephen King does: it takes his fascination with inherent evil, an innocent child hero, and a spiral into bloody madness, and it does so in less than 700 pages.  It's nerve-wracking, claustrophobic, terrifying, and exhilarating, and has made more of an impression on me than almost any other book.

The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris
Will there ever be a psychopath as charismatic as Hannibal Lecter?  I honestly kind of hope not - one of the things that makes him so memorable is how unique he is in the horror landscape.  I prefer this one to the followup, Hannibal, both because the ending doesn't go totally off the rails but also because watching two dangerously insane people circle each other like tigers makes for some gripping thrills.  Buffalo Bill is horrible, but even his flaying activities can't compare to the smooth, eerie, compelling cannibal Lecter.

Needs Moar Discworld

34. I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett
I'm done with the Tiffany Aching books now, and that is a sincere tragedy.  I love Tiffany and the witches almost as much as I love Sam Vimes in the Discworld universe, and I would be very sad if Tiffany didn't manage to make her way into future Discworld adventures.  She is clever, resourceful, pragmatic; but in true Pratchett style, she's also proud, a little short-sighted, and short-tempered.  Watching her suck it up and solve the problems her own actions cause is inspiring to anyone who's ever had to fix a mess they caused with good intentions.

35. The Black Angel, John Connolly
Typically, I prefer the Connolly books with a less overt supernatural tone, but this Charlie Parker mystery was everything I want in supernatural crime noir.  I love it when books explore the deeply weird, and Black Angel is not afraid to go there - ossuaries, art crafted from human bone, and the darker side of religious belief play prominent roles.  Louis and Angels, the caustic sidekicks, are back where I think they're strongest: as Parker's squadmates, just left of the spotlight, where they shine best.    

36. Cinder, Marissa Meyer
This was a big pile of meh.  I'd heard good things, but this dystopic, pseud-cyberpunk retelling of Cinderella didn't live up to the hype for me.  It doesn't deviate enough from the original fairytale for the "big reveal" to actually be a surprise, and the villains are too shallow to be interesting.  I think I can take a pass on the future installments of this series.

February, part 2

12. The Man In the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Very cerebral and kind of a downer, but since I've read Philip K. Dick before I kind of knew what to expect.  This book showcases pretty excellently how Dick excels at world-building; not only is his alternate reality where the U.S. lost World War II fully realized, but so is the alternate-alternate reality of the book-within-a-book, where the U.S. won the war (but not with the fallout we're familiar with).  And if that made sense to you, you should probably read this book.

13. White Cat, Holly Black
Holly Black is super fun - way darker and grittier than Melissa Marr, while still maintaining that thread of wish fulfillment that's kind of the hallmark of supernatural YA.  I found this one a little predictable, but still quite exciting; in this particular fantasy world, certain people have natural abilities to work magic on others (called "curse workers," or just "workers") and they come in different flavors - some can work luck, some emotion, some death, and so on.  Cassel, the main character, comes from an entirely worker family - except for him.  There's mobsters, con artists, and assassins, and the whole thing is pretty delightful.  (Except it's written in present tense, RAWR.  At least this one is first person.)

14.  The Reapers, John Connolly
I like John Connolly a whole lot.  He writes mostly crime noir, about a private detective named Charlie Parker (the first Parker book is Dark Hollow - I HIGHLY recommend it for anyone who likes crime fiction or gritty supernatural stuff); his stories are typically gripping and suspenseful, he has a nice subtle supernatural element, and his side characters are entertaining and rich.  But I had trouble with this one.  It focuses on Parker's two most notorious cohorts, Angel and Louis, who typically provide a nice dose of banter while being ruthless killers.  Having a whole book focused on them (mostly on Louis, the professional assassin) might be too much of a good thing.

In which I confess to failure

I've been meaning to put something up sooner, and I even found cover images for two REALLY good Charles de Lint novels (I liked Yarrow more than Angel of Darkness, but that's because I have more of a predilection for fantasy than crime noir) but I haven't for several reasons. Reasons two through seven have to do with how lazy I've been feeling, but the biggest is because I feel like something of a literary failure. And the reason for that is because I didn't like Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

I didn't like Never Let Me Go by Kazu0 Ishiguro, either, and I think they're related phenomena. They both feature strings of winding narratives, sometimes only vaguely (if at all) connected to each other, and ethereal/metaphysical-thinking characters that I couldn't feel any real attachment to. I'm no stranger to introspection, and I even appreciate it in stories, but I felt like narrative was being sacrificed for the sake of reflection and that doesn't give me much to hold on to. In the spirit of honesty I confess I didn't actually finish Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but at about 3/4 of the way through it I realized I didn't care what the ending was. It is a chunker of a book, and I'd spent a couple weeks trying to slog through it, and I just couldn't do it any more. I guess I will never know what the secret of the narrator's wife is, or why the hell I had to read that horrible story about killing all the zoo animals. Oh well.

So then I read a string of Terry Pratchett novels, including one I hadn't read before (Thud!) and they were all excellent. I'm partial to Pratchett's novels about the City Watch, because Sam Vimes and Lord Vetinari have some of the best repartee I've ever encountered. Pratchett's books hover on the formulaic, but it's a formula that works - Vimes is a character that demands your respect if not your love, and from me he's got both. Following him through crime and his Batman-esque struggle to stay on the right side of the law is always a brilliant morality play (and you know the bad guy will get it in the end, sometimes by having fireworks crammed in unfortunate places).

I just finished a total absorption with one of John Connolly's mystery novels featuring Charlie Parker, who I'd only known previously from his short story collection Nocturnes. Dark Hallow was a book I waffled on the whole time I was reading it, and then at the very end it delivered me such a sharp dart of clarity that everything I'd had trouble with slotted neatly into place. My original concern had been that Connolly was spreading his resources too thin - there were too many stories, too many characters, and not quite enough holding it all together. The reward at the end is finding out they're all one story, and that every character has a purpose, and that every seemingly-chatty side story fits neatly into the narrative and becomes one cohesive whole. It is a fine bit of storytelling, which is good because I REALLY loved The Book of Lost Things (which you can read about below) and also Nocturnes.

For the moment I'm taking a break, although I'll undoubtedly return to Connolly and Charlie Parker. For now, I'm going to appease the creature-feature lover in me and see about reading The Lost World. I can't really imagine NOT liking it, since Jurassic Park is so awesome, but I guess you never know. Especially with Michael Crichton.

Fairytales

I've just emerged from a long, long period of frantic paper writing, project completion, and the culmination of commencement. I'm no longer soon-to-be-graduating, I am an official college graduate. While this is not an excuse for not posting anything in over a month, it....well, yes, it is an excuse. But bear with me.

John Connolly, in addition to writing very entertaining mystery novels, also writes brilliantly good, dark, edgy fantasy. Today I'm going to tell you why you should go and read his novel, The Book of Lost Things.



The Book of Lost Things is everything a modern fairytale should be. Its main character, David, is a young boy who is neither insipidly precocious nor idiotically naive. He is smart, introverted, and suffers from an abruptly destroyed family when his mother dies from illness. When his father remarries and has the audacity to have another son with the new wife, David escapes into the fantasy of books and an unkempt, sunken garden in the back of the house his father moves them into.

What follows is an adventure worthy of the Grimm Brothers, as David is transported into a fairyworld that takes every expectation you might have and turns it on its ear. Connolly cunningly takes basic fairytale tropes and twists them unexpectedly at the very last minute, leaving you on your toes through the whole novel. The combination of that vein of familiriaty coupled with Connolly's own imagination means that the ending, while somewhat predictable, is still profound and will leave you thoroughly satisfied.

The Book of Lost Things has several winning components: an endearing, likeable, and realistic main character, a frightening and sadistic villain, and an engaging story. I'm about to start Connolly's book of short fiction, Nocturnes, and I'll let you know how that is posthaste.